The Rain Before it Falls (15 page)

They took a taxi from Primrose Hill to Marylebone. The sisters perched on the foldaway seats, with their backs to the driver, while Gill sat facing them, hemmed in on either side by instrument cases, a small amplifier, a canvas holdall cat’s-cradled-full of flexes and cables, and another small flight-case housing some electronic device which she had, so far, been unable to identify. Bright, fleeting amber light from the streetlamps flashed to and fro across her face as she struggled to get comfortable.

‘Do you really need all this stuff?’ she asked Catharine. ‘I thought you were just going to play the flute.’

‘Ah, but you haven’t heard what she does with her magical gizmo,’ said Elizabeth, swollen with sisterly pride. ‘Just wait. You’ll think there are twelve of her.’

Not understanding this remark, Gill sat back and gazed out of the window, huddling her raincoat around herself as she felt shivers running through her: whether from cold or anticipation she couldn’t say. She was nervous on Catharine’s behalf, even though she had seen her performing in public plenty of times before; at the same time, this little concert, which might have seemed a momentous prospect a few hours ago, had started to assume less importance since the playing of those tapes. She was sure that Elizabeth and even Catharine were feeling the same thing: that this recital – the whole reason for her coming down to London in the first place – had become little more than an interlude, now, a frustrating interruption to the progress of Aunt Rosamond’s story, an unwelcome incursion into the present when they were all suddenly preoccupied with the past, with the gradual unveiling of their family’s occult, unsuspected history.

As they drove on towards Cavendish Square, a freezing mist began to descend. It gave London – or at least this quiet, prosperous, solemn corner of London – a ghostly, unfamiliar air. The massive outlines of fine old buildings dissolved into shadows, purplish and inscrutable. Wreaths of mist unfurled in the glimmer of streetlamps, placed at silvery intervals along the length of Wimpole Street. Even though they could see, as they disembarked from the taxi, that a trickle of people had already begun to arrive at the church, there was little traffic here: most of the audience seemed to be coming on foot. They passed by in groups of three or four, clutching coats tightly against the cold. Catharine recognized some of the faces; greetings and hugs were exchanged while her mother and sister unloaded her cases and paid off the taxi driver.

Gill waited outside while her daughters lugged the equipment backstage, then she and Elizabeth entered the church together and made their way down the aisle towards an empty pew. She was conscious, now, of a mounting disorientation, a sense that she was half-removed from her surroundings. Shadows of the past, remembrances, continued to loom over her. This church: a church on a winter’s night, in the West End of London, playing host to a concert… It was hardly likely to be the same one, she supposed, as the church where Rosamond and Rebecca had attended their first concert together (that had been in Mayfair, hadn’t it?): but still, the coincidence – if that’s what it was – made her skin tingle. She gazed around her at the warm, muted colours, the candlelight glinting off the golden chancel rail, even bringing the figures on the stained glass windows to some sort of deceptive, flickering life, and she felt that the air was charged with something of the same wonder and bewitchment as on the night, more than half a century ago, when those two women had first dared to guess their feelings for each other.

When Catharine began to play, this intimation grew even stronger. She was third on a bill of five students from her music college, all performing to an audience of friends, colleagues and family. First, a pianist, who had chosen something long, dreamlike and unexpectedly melodic by John Cage. This was followed by a brutally modernist piece for solo cello. It then took a few minutes, and some help from two sound engineers – powering up amplifiers and adjusting the height of a microphone stand – before Catharine was ready to step forward. A hush fell upon the audience, who had grown restless, and a little disgruntled, during the setting-up of her equipment. In the near-silence that followed, the hum from Catharine’s amplifier was distinctly audible.

After a pause, and a frown of concentration, she began by playing a long, low, single note on her flute. Then she let it hang in the air, and decay.

Then she played another long note – a minor third above the first – and followed it, after a few seconds’ silence, with a simple three-note phrase in an apparently unrelated key.

Next, she clicked on her foot pedal, and suddenly, miraculously, the two notes and the phrase she had already played were repeated, and repeated again. She clicked again, and the notes began to blossom and multiply. Chords began to form, and loops of sound were created, shifting in and out of phase with each other, until the air seemed to be filled with a whole ensemble of flutes, over whose uncanny concord Catharine began to improvise quiet, tentative, fragmentary melodic lines. The music seemed infinitely sad and eerie, as if it were somehow drifting into the church not just from some remote, unvisited place, but from the distant past. Not for the first time that evening, Gill felt her skin turn to goosebumps, and found herself shivering. She’d heard Catharine playing the work of other composers often enough. But it was twice as thrilling, and ten times stranger, to know that the sounds she could hear now were coming from the imagination of her own daughter, someone whom she herself had once brought into the world. At that moment, she knew that they had never been so close to each other: Gill knew exactly what Catharine was thinking, exactly what images were passing through her mind, with every stretched, pregnant note. The music she was playing was not abstract. It was a soundtrack: the soundtrack to a story they had heard together only a few hours earlier, about two little girls, running away from home, on a winter’s night in wartime Shropshire. Catharine was thinking of the hidden path that led to the caravan, the rustle of leaves overhead as Beatrix led her trusting cousin away into the forest, the gaunt and sombre silhouette of Warden Farm standing out blackly in the moonlight. These images, these fitful, antique images, were somehow inscribed into the fabric of her music. Gill could not have been more convinced of the fact, even if her daughter had been trying to describe the scene in words.

She glanced across at Elizabeth, and could see that she was feeling it too. And when the improvisation was over, after around seven or eight haunted minutes, they did not, at first, join in with the audience’s vigorous applause. Instead they turned and looked at each other, and Elizabeth saw that, although her mother was smiling, proud and joyful and almost overcome with admiration, her eyes were also gleaming moistly.

Afterwards, along with many of Catharine’s friends, they went to a pub in Wigmore Place and waited for her arrival. There were more than twelve of them squeezed around the table, including Daniel, the obscurely untrustworthy boyfriend (who had arrived late for the concert), and the pale, waiflike and rather beautiful redheaded pianist who had played the piece by John Cage.

‘That was
amazing,’
Gill said, leaping up and hugging her daughter as soon as she came in. Daniel hurried off to buy her a drink, and Catharine squeezed herself into a corner of the table, to a general chorus of greetings and congratulations.

‘That gadget of yours,’ said Daniel, when he returned with her pint of Guinness, ‘I was trying to work out what it does. Is there a little hard disk in there, or something?’

‘Trade secret,’ said Catharine, flashing him a flirty smile.

‘No, but I imagine everything you play into there – within certain parameters – is recorded instantaneously, and then repeated back, is it?’

The workings of the device were not what interested Gill, so she allowed the conversation to go on without listening too closely. It was soon bogged down in minute and unfathomable technicalities. Elizabeth was looking at her watch.

‘Getting tired?’ Gill asked.

‘No. I was just wondering how soon we could get away. I’m dying to listen to the rest of those tapes.’

‘Oh.’ Gill was surprised. ‘I thought we’d do that tomorrow morning.’

‘
What
?’ said Elizabeth, turning on her. ‘You’ve got to be joking. We’re going back to Catharine’s place right now.’

Gill glanced over at her daughter, still deep in ever more specialized conversation with Daniel. ‘Are you sure we’re invited?’ she asked, nodding at them meaningfully.

‘Well… that’s a good point.’ Elizabeth looked doubtful, but only for a moment. ‘I’ll have a word with her. Don’t worry about it.’

It transpired, in any case, that Daniel had to be up early for a seminar the next morning, and had not been planning to go home with Catharine after all. So it seemed there was no obstacle to their returning to Primrose Hill that night, and following Rosamond’s story to its conclusion. Gill was worried that this meant she wouldn’t get to bed until very late, and wondered if she would find herself locked out of her hotel; but her daughters told her not to fret. ‘They have twenty-four-hour porters for that sort of thing,’ said Elizabeth knowledgeably. They left just before last orders were called. Daniel stood up to kiss Catharine goodbye: a kiss so ostentatious, and reverent, that Gill (reproving herself, at the same time, for her scepticism) wondered if he was not over-compensating for something. It also struck her that he had not actually complimented Catharine on her performance, but merely taken an interest in the workings of her echo machine, or whatever it was. A thought she would have dismissed as irrelevant, probably, had it not been that – just as she was following her daughters out of the door – she spotted Daniel reseating himself next to the redheaded pianist, and caught the first words that he spoke to her. Which were something like: ‘That was one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard in my life.’

∗

Eleven-thirty. They are back in Catharine’s flat, at the very top of that austere, lofty Victorian house, the sounds of night-time London forgotten again, far beneath them. A bottle of red wine opened, this time, to fortify them against whatever shocks the remaining tapes hold in store. Some bread, cheese and grapes, laid out on a chopping board on the floor, with knives and plates: but nobody seems to want them. The noise of the plane tree, again, as it taps against the windowpane. The overhead lamp switched off, so that the only light in the room comes from the coal-effect gas fire, turned down low and dancing away cheerfully enough in the grate. That, and the phosphorescent turquoise glow from the display panel on Catharine’s stereo system. Kneeling before it, she ejects the latest tape to see whether it needs turning over yet, finds that there is still half of this side left to run; and puts it back into the machine. She crawls over to the fire and sits cross-legged in front of it; checks with her mother and sister that they are ready to start listening; and presses the remote control.

Once again, they hear the onset of hiss, and the ambient noise which tells them that they are back in Shropshire, back in Rosamond’s bungalow, back in her sitting room, where she sits surrounded by ghosts and photographs. A prefatory cough, the clearing of a frail, elderly woman’s throat, and the flow of narrative resumes.

Number twelve. Ah. This one, Imogen, is probably my favourite picture of all. The memories associated with it are exquisitely happy. Almost painfully so. I hope that I can describe it to you calmly, with some objectivity. I have not looked at this picture – not dared to look at it, to tell the truth – for many years. You will have to give me a moment or two to take it all in, and to compose my thoughts, and my feelings.

Very well. A lake, first of all. Clear blue sky, absolutely cloudless. A rich cerulean blue at the very top of the picture, and then getting paler and paler until the sky is almost white where it brushes the top of the mountains. Mountains in the distance, yes: twin peaks, one on either side of the picture, with a long ridge connecting them, dipping gently in the middle. No snow on these peaks today, although there certainly would be in the winter. At the foot of the mountains pastureland begins, and starts to tumble in green, undulating folds towards the far shore of the lake, broken intermittently by patches of pine forest and, almost hidden away in one valley, you can just see a small village, with the church spire rising proudly from a muddle of clustered white buildings and red roofs. This village, unless I’m much mistaken, would be Murol. For we are in the Auvergne district of France, and it is the height of summer: a long, silent, perfect day in the summer of 1955.

We are looking at Lac Chambon, which lies towards the south of the region. The lake is quite still, and reflects the outline of the mountains with exact, unmoving symmetry, so that if you stare at the picture long enough, it starts to look almost like an abstract study in geometry. Trees line the far shore of the lake, and in the foreground of the picture, occupying most of the top right-hand corner, there are the tangled, intertwining branches of a chestnut tree. This tree overhangs a small shingle beach, beyond which, standing in the water, there are two figures with their backs to the camera: a young girl, about six or seven years old, with fair, slightly brownish hair tied into two pigtails, wearing a swimsuit with pink and white vertical stripes; and next to her, a young woman of about twenty-five, wearing a plain navy-blue swimsuit, and a short white pleated skirt over the top – a tennis skirt, I think, in all probability. The woman has blonde hair – brilliant blonde hair, almost white – which falls just short of her shoulders. She is broad-shouldered and athletic-looking, but also slim, and graceful, with long, slender arms and legs. She is bending slightly, to help the little girl with something: it’s not entirely clear what, but I suspect she is trying to teach her how to skim stones. They are both standing a few yards out into the lake. The woman is Rebecca, of course, and the little girl is Thea. The person taking the photograph was myself, and when I took it I was lying in a meadow above the beach, surrounded by long grass and wild flowers. You can see a few of the blades of grass, and the petals of what I take to be yellow saxifrage at the very forefront of the picture, blurred and out of focus.